I take a last look at St. Endellion standing on a cliff top of this Atlantic coast. The sun turns the water into moving green. In November weather, if the day is bright, the cliffs here are in shadow. The sun cannot rise high enough to strike them. The bracken is dead and brown, the grassy cliff tops vivid green; red berries glow in bushes. Ice cream cartons and cigarette packets left by summer visitors have been blown into crevices and soaked to pulp. The visitors are there for a season. Man’s life on earth will last for seventy years perhaps. But this sea will go on swirling against these green and purple rocks for centuries. Long after we are dead it will rush up in waterfalls of whiteness that seem to hang half-way up the cliff face and then come pouring down with tons of ginger-beery foam. Yet compared with the age of these rocks, the sea’s life is nothing. And even the age of rocks is nothing compared with the eternal life of man. And up there on the hill in St. Endellion church, eternal man comes week by week in the Eucharist.That is the supreme mystery of all the mysteries of St. Endellion. Port Isaac
Can it really be that a town is half a mile away? I have walked between high Cornish hedges from St. Endellion, once the parish church of Port Isaac. The tower dwindles. The lane winds. The slate of the hedges is overgrown with grasses, bed-straw and milky-pink convolvulus, pale purple scabious and here and there darker valerian. From several places standing on a hedge or looking through a gate, I can glimpse the sea. The sea is there all right, the great Atlantic, emerald green, wrinkled, glittering, sliding streaks of water, spotted dark blue here and there with reflections. It was a full tide, tamed and quiet for the moment, sliding round this inhospitable coast of North Cornwall, with white crescents of surf floating close inshore. From here on these high-up fields, where blackthorn is sliced by the sea wind and leans inland, I can see all along the rocky cliffs to Tintagel Head. Behind me is even grander coast to the Rumps Point and Pentire. Cliffs and ocean are fine to watch from these high, windy fields as cloud shadows race over them. But where can there be a town? Less than half a mile and still no sight of it!
There is no doubt this is the way to approach Port Isaac, from St. Endellion on the Polzeath side of the port. The final hill is very steep and there is only a disused quarry in which you can park a motor car if you are not on foot. Not until you round a corner do you see any sign of Port Isaac at all. Then you see it all, huddled in a steep valley, a cover at the end of a combe, roofs and roofs, tumbling down either steep hillside in a race for shelter from the south-west gales. A fresh-water stream pours brown and cold along the valley, under slate bridges, between old houses, under the road and out into the little harbour.
Port Isaac is Polperro without the self-consciousness, St. Ives without the artists. The same whitewashed slate houses with feathery-looking roofs which have been “grouted”—that is to say the old slates have been cemented over and limewashed—the same narrow airless passages between whitewashed walls. But here are winding paths that climb up steps of beautiful blue-green Delabole slate to other winding paths, hills too steep for anyone with heart trouble to manage, roads and lanes too narrow for buses or coaches. One of the sights of Port Isaac used to be to watch the Life-Boat being brought down Fore Street and missing the walls by inches as she was manœuvred round the bend at the Golden Lion into the Town Platt.
Port Isaac has no grand architecture.
A simple slate Methodist chapel and Sunday school in the Georgian tradition hangs over the harbour and is the prettiest building in the town. On the opposite side of the water is a picturesque Gothic style school, from whose pointed windows the teachers could, if they wished, pitch their pupils down the cliff side into the harbour below. Then, lost in rambling cliff paths between the walls, some so narrow that a fat man could not use them, is my favourite house in Port Isaac. It is called the “Birdcage”: an irregular pentagon in shape, one small room thick, and three storeys high, and hung on the weather sides with slates which have gone a delicate silvery blue. It’s empty now and obviously “condemned.” For that is the sad thing about Port Isaac. It is the kind of place Town Planners hate: the quintessence of the quaint. There are no boulevards, no car stands or clinics. The dentist calls once a week and brings his instruments with him in his car.
The Community Centre is all wrong by Town Planning standards. It is not the public-house, but the Liberal Club. Anyone who knows Cornish fishermen must know that most of them do not drink, many are chapel-goers and a Liberal Club without a licence is the sort of place where you would expect to find them.
The trade of Port Isaac really is fishing. The harbour does not draw much water.It hardly is a harbour.A better description would be an unexpected cove between high cliffs. Two arms have been built out into the water to keep back the bigger seas, while great guardian headlands keep the harbour calm in most weathers. It is used by small craft and these are reached by
